Pet foods made from insects are a “great idea” and likely to become one of the trends we see next year, according to Pete ‘The Vet’ Wedderburn.

Insect-based foods are becoming increasingly common as the realities of the climate crisis begin to hit home and, pet food is expected to be one area that experiences an early-adoption boom.

Research carried out by Rabobank earlier this year suggests the insect-based pet food market could increase 50-fold by the end of the decade.

The study found that the demand for insect protein as animal feed could reach half a million metric tonnes by 2030.

Meanwhile, research carried out at UCLA found that feeding cats and dogs creates the equivalent of 64 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year – the same as driving 13.6 million cars for a year.

On Late Breakfast with Clare McKenna this morning, Pete ‘The Vet’ Wedderburn said insect-based foods are a “great idea”.

“I think that we should all be looking for more sustainable, environmentally friendly ways of doing everything and that includes pet food,” he said.

“In some ways, pet food is actually very sustainable because it does tend to use waste products that are not suitable for human consumption, so it is actually already quite a sustainable industry – but insects are even more sustainable.

“There is an Irish vet that is producing an insect-based food that I trialled on my own pets and they absolutely loved it. This is my dogs and they really enjoyed eating it, so I think the technology and the knowledge of how to rear insects and to process them to create tasty food, that has moved on a lot in the last three or four years.

“So that is, I think, one of the trends we will see in 2022 – more of these foods available to our pets and once they are nutritionally complete, why not feed them to them?